DotNetNuke Documentation

One of the biggest complaints about DotNetNuke, is, and always has been, the lack of documentation. I’ve been trying to help correct that problem for a while now. A year ago I started writing a book that was Published in June, DotNetNuke 5: A User’s Guide, I think it turned out to be a good resource for people looking to learn how to setup and use DNN to build a website.

The book however can’t cover everything about DNN, and wasn’t intended too. There are a number of other books out there for DNN, they all provide good resources as well, but people still want something more, something electronic, as a resource for documentation.

A few months ago (I can’t believe how time flies, I started this back in June or July I think) I started putting together a new project to try and tackle the DNN Documentation problem. I would like to introduce DotNetNukeDocs.com. What? Someone setup ANOTHER wiki project to try and document DNN? Yes, yes I did, but let me tell you why I think this project is different.

First off, I’m the project leader for the DotNetNuke Wiki module, and have been for a number of years. I’ve always had a problem with the Wiki module, I never really had anywhere to use it besides some documentation for our products at Engage. Unfortunately because of this lack of usage I haven’t done much with the Wiki module over the years, releases have been slacking, and features have been lacking. I figured out that every DNN Module project leader should have a direct need for their module, and I’ve come up with that need. DotNetNukeDocs.com has caused me to make quite a few changes to the Wiki module over the past few months, and right now that module is just waiting to be passed through the review process and become an official release, version 04.02.00.

Oliver Hine and I have been trying to brain dump what we can about DNN into the DNNDocs website to start building up content. We haven’t put as much information as we would like to in there, but I think the site is starting to come along, and in order for it to continue growing I’m opening it up to the world. If you have information about DotNetNuke that you would like to put into the DotNetNuke Documentation Wiki please do! Get Registered on the website, once you do that I’ll add you to the contributors roll and you can start working on content. We do have a few rules (subject to change) that I would suggest reading before you submit your content.

Future plans for the site include some additional tracking modules to provide stats of who provides the most information into the Wiki, in return for this providing links back to those contributor’s websites, link love at it’s finest. I will also be adding more features to the Wiki module over the next few months to help solidify that module as a great solution for DNN Wikis, right now it definitely lacks some much needed features.

Stay tuned as we build up what I hope becomes a great resource for DotNetNuke Documentation, if you have any questions please let me know!